Heirloom Vases, Artillery Shells, and Souvenirs

I've always known we get our english noun "souvenir" from the french verb meaning "to remember".

I've always known this humble brass vase my Mom keeps on her mantle:

As you age yourself, you become more interested in family history and family heirlooms so, for the first time, I recently asked about the origin of this vase.  "Oh that is a repurposed, spent artillery shell from World War One," she casually informs me.

This floored me that this (for me) quotidian item that I have known all my life should quietly harbor such a profound and violent past.  Maybe a great uncle of my Mom's served in WWI, we are not sure.  

In any case, how cool is it that my family has an actual swords-into-plowshares keepsake?

Let Us Beat Swords Into Ploughshares, Evgeniy Vuchetich 1959

"They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." - Book of Isiah

Thank you for beating your artillery shells into vases, French infantrymen.  I will souviendrai you every time I look at this souvenir.

Communing with Cinema

Recently, I introduced my son to one of my all time favorite movies, Wings of Desire.  I still remember seeing it for the first time as a freshman at Purdue (1988) and walking out with a friend and he wanted to talk about the movie because he thought it was a good movie.  I didn't want to talk about it because I felt I had just experienced something holy and profound.

By now, I've probably seen it 5 or 6 times.  But you know the funny thing about really deep experiences?  They keep giving you something new. In the movie's penultimate scene, the two lovers finally meet in a club (with Nick Cave playing on stage in the adjoining room of course).  What follows is a speech that tries to combine the dual themes of the movie:  Love for the city (love for mankind), and Romantic Love.  What I had failed to appreciate on prior viewing was that the glass of wine offered by Damiel to Marion.  It is as if a priest were offering it in communion as a sacrament.  They hold the glass together and look into each other's eyes.  She takes a sip, he takes a sip and then the glass sits there in the background for the rest of the scene.

A sacrament is a 'sacred mystery'

Communion is fellowship or sharing something together.  

Of course Damiel has sacrificed the eternal for the temporal, but it appears to me that he is the receiver of the blessing and Marion is the giver as she takes the first sip.  Life, after all, is the sacred mystery here and the community of people is what Damiel has longed for.  His love for her is what 'freed' him...

Oh, the Nick Cave song in the background? "From Her to Eternity" of course!

------

P.S. It's not just art that has this 'revisit and enrich' aspect of course.  Sometimes a math equation or a law of physics can continue to reveal their secrets to you slowly over time...

Origami Summer

 I like origami like I like singing:  I appreciate it as a spectator not as a do-er.

(As an aside, I find it interesting that in recent years, I have seen a resurgence of interest in both Origami and Chess with the high school crowd.  Both upward trends in popularity seem to predate COVID but the COVID isolation/take-on-a-hobby days would lend themselves to taking on these particular activities I imagine.  Anyway...)

Early this summer (just after the school year), a colleague reached out and asked if I would be willing to help out for one week at an engineering summer camp.  The designated instructor had to leave for the last week of an intensive course on origami and robotics.  By then the campers were working on their projects and I was just kind of like a helper/cheerleader for their independent work.  It was interesting to see what they came up with.  These are the kind of projects school leaders and community members find so fascinating and are always pushing us to do more of in regular school.  The experience reinforced my own take which is that projects are fun, interesting, enriching, but ultimately not super educational.  Perfect for a summer workshop or as a do-it-yourself kit at home.  

Some of the student projects (they were based on these origami robotics kits):

New Arm for Mars Rover

Air-Bag like Bumpers

Robotic Hand

Robotic Leg

Customized Robotic Pillow

Later this same Summer, we visited the Atlanta Botanical Gardens where they were having an outdoor Origami sculpture exhibit (technically origami-inspired) by Jennifer and Kevin Box:

"Inverted" - showing the fold lines only

Atlanta Botanical Garden's signature piece in the background! 

As I fold up my summer-time memories and encode them into long term storage in a specific combination of new weighting between my dendrites and their adjacent neurons in my own brain, I ponder how the multidimensional nature of my memories of the summer get reduced to those simple factors in my brain.  In order to do any thinking at all, my cellular machinery gets unpacked from a linear array of encoded instructions.  All the 3D geometry of biochemistry springing into being from a linear array:

Well, I guess I've not only been immersed in Origami this summer, but it's immersed in me as well...

 

Simple Memories

Waiting in my backyard for the chicken to finish on the grill (hey, it's what I do), enjoying the weather in the fading daylight.  As I was looking up at the branches of some of the old oaks in my backyard  (the branching patterns recalling for me the divergence points in a person's own timeline), 

the breeze kicked up a notch or two.  The cool air moving across me felt strangely soft.  As I was enjoying this unexpected air-bathing sensation, I realized the wind was tickling my leg hairs as I stood there in my shorts and sandals.

Suddenly I was 13 or so and heading out to the beach for the first time that summer, as I excitedly exited the narrow pathway I always took to the expanse of the ocean, I was taking a moment to appreciate the beach itself - the waves, the sun, the stiff breeze carrying the unmistakeable smell of the sea.  This was The Beach - the one near my grandparent's house in Corsica; the Beach to which all others were compared since it is deep in my psyche as an Important Place.  I felt something tickling my legs and wondering if the wind was strong enough to be kicking up the sand and that was striking my legs? 

No, the wind didn't seem to be strong enough.  I looked down and discovered that my legs were covered with tiny hairs.  The wind tickling them was a new sensation.  It was the first time I had worn shorts outside in the wind since that pubescent transformation had happened.

That I am the same person right now in my backyard as I was some forty years ago really struck me.  I stood there in my own backyard, smelling the chicken reaching its final stages and feeling that breeze and marveling at that fact in the magical light of dusk.  I am that same person and yet not quite the same.  We are connected over all that time.  I contain the sum total of that 13 year old boy marveling at the sea and discovering that the wind can tickle you.  

That's amazing isn't it?

Video Game IRL

 So, in Skyrim, I've hung around a few sawmills (when you are low level, you gotta do some grunt work to earn some coin and build your rep with the townfolk, you know what I mean?):

I just figured this was some clever creation of the game designers.  However, it turns out, real sawmills were pretty similar as I discovered while visiting Catoctin Mountain Park:

So what does it say about me that when I see a real re-creation of a saw mill from the olden days, I think "Hey this is just like in Skyrim."  Maybe makes me kinda lame, but (possibly?) also makes me kinda cool?  Don't worry, I won't be polling anyone anytime soon on this!

I think Skyrim got their water wheel wrong though.  In the game, they have a traditional mill-style wheel on the side catching some slow flowing water whereas IRL they seem to need fast moving water driving a wheel that is directly beneath the mechanism. (there are two here because the smaller one is used to drive the log forward into the blade which is driven by the bigger one in the back.  Clever engineering!)

How Not to Teach Your Daughter to Drive

 1. Leave your old 2008 Honda Accord undriven for a month or so in the driveway.

 2. Drive a very short distance to the high school parking lot.

3. Spend a long time teaching her how to turn on the lights, the blinkers, the wipers, etc.

4. Do step #3 without actually turning on the engine

5. Have her finally crank on the engine to take a little drive around the parking lot only to find out the battery is now very dead.

If only I knew something about batteries, alternators, or electricity, maybe I could have seen this coming! *sigh*

(I, of course, just left the car sitting there for a day or so while I slowly extracted the old battery (well used from 2014) and replaced it with a new one in the parking lot.  It took me more trips back and forth from home because I compounded my idiocy by not bring the right wrench or any WD-40 the first time...)

Like Father Like Son Like... Frog?

Seb and I found inspiration with a new found green friend("it ain't easy") at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens:

  Thinking Deep Thoughts...

Compare to us at the Rodin Museum a few years back...

Rumsfeldian Signs

 When the exit sign tells you about their known unknowns:

So sad, Exit 257 - you want some "Attractions" but none yet...

And then there are the exit signs that don't even know what they don't know:

photo creds: Irene

Or, as Donald Rumsfeld famously called it, their "unknown unknowns":

P.S. I just found out that Rumsfeld had first heard of the concept of known unknowns and unknown unknowns from a NASA administrator.  No wonder this speech of his resonated with me and so many others at the time.  Just goes to say, you can learn something from anyone if you care to!

On Top of the World

 (Well, over a kilometer up anyway at Bearfence Mountain in the Shenandoah National Park)

Resting after a rock scramble of a hike (photo credits: Irene)

Click here to see an interactive map of the hike:

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/9221881216

Here's my panoramic from the top:

Turns out this recent short hike is the most documented hike of mine, ever... funny how pervasive technology has become even on a nature outing!